Kingfast F3 Plus SSD Review (240GB) – Looks Like The Real Thing

Ok so we have had a few hectic weeks since the last KingFast F3 Plus SSD was received and analysed. In result, KingFast was nice enough to send us a new one right away.

Based in Shenzen, China, KingFast ships about 50,000 SSDs monthly when we combine enterprise, business, consumer and oem. Our analysis today examines the F3 Plus which is yet another in the ‘LSI SandForce Driven’ family. We are all too aware of the performance that should be expected.

Although having limited sales on sites such as Amazon, KingFast is not to well known to North America which is a bit unusual as they are an SSD only company with what seems to be very high distribution. A bit about them can be found here and their website is set up to accommodate worldwide purchase. Considering that KingFast has everything in place to be a very strong SSD resource worldwide, one has to wonder why they haven’t honed in on the North American market to a larger degree.

KingFast F3 PLUS SSD

The F3 Plus appears to be a newer version of the F3, both still available, and we couldn’t find a distinct difference between the two. Both are SATA 3, backwards compatible to SATA 2, available in 7mm or 9mm heights, are available in 60, 120, 240, and 480GB, carry a three year warranty and have specifications of roughly 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write with over 80,000 IOPS. We did find some earlier documentation on the original F3 that listed write speeds at 410MB/s, but current site specs don’t reflect that.

Exterior packaging is as we might see on most SSDs these days and contains an Installation Guide, desktop adapter, data cable and a certification label that details the production date and validation that it has been personally inspected. The SSD itself is of a silver brushed aluminum exterior and very well machined. Four screws are contained on the bottom which secure both parts of the exterior and a security sticker is found on the side to prevent tampering.

INTERNAL COMPONENTS

Inside the SSD shell is a green PCB containing an SSD controller and 16 modules of NAND flash memory. The controller is a LSI SandForce SF-2281 flash storage processor and the memory is Intel 25nm MLC synchronous NAND flash memory with each module being 16GB in size.

Including this specific memory is actually pretty unusual in the new age of TLC and smaller memory and a definite plus considering this memory is rated at 5000 program and erase cycles, whereas 3000 has become the norm. This memory still exists in the top SSDs available today, to include the Intel 520 and Kingston Hyper X.

The KingFast F3 Plus contains 16 modules of 16GB capacity memory for a total of 256GB RAW capacity. This is a LSI SandForce driven SSD which means that one 16GB memory chip is proprietary to their needs for firmware and over provisioning. Once formatted, the capacity available to the user for storage is 224GB.